Pieter Levels launched Avatar AI as an ‘AI mini project‘ in October, 2022. The service quickly went viral and surpassed the income he made from his other projects.

He had his first sale within 17 minutes of announcing the launch. An hour later, he had made 6 sales.

He has been building the product in public.

Types of photos

Pieter also added different types of problems in response to audience requests:

Styles

Sales

He made $10k within a day from over 139 customers. This includedover $4100 in first 17 hours.

These sales were mostly from Twitter. However, Instagram quickly became the top referrer after it went viral on the platform

After 10 days, he had made $100’000 USD from Avatar AI. He had made 2,943 sales with an average of $33 per sale. He had paid around $25k in GPU costs, which included $8k in just one day.

Marketing

Pieter has done a couple of marketing experiments.

He launched Avatar AI on Product Hunt on November 2. It became the #2 Product of the Day with over 900 upvotes. View the launch.

He offered a special Halloween promotion. Customers could get %25 off.

He added a referral link. People could get extra avatars if they shared the linked on social media.

Privacy

He shared a Twitter thread about the risks of train models leaking from AI apps.

He made a robot that auto deleted all photos, and the entire AI model, 24 hours after rendering.

Technical Issues

Spent an evening making making a robot to process the unfinished jobs. Some people wouldn’t get their avatars as the GPU image library occasionally died due to bad input files. He made a mini dashboard to keep track of GPU jobs to try and reduce the failed jobs from 5% to %0.

He temporarily took the API that he used to train the models down after too many people signed up.

Copycats

He quickly saw ads on Upwork from people wanting to build similar websites.